National championship ticket prices are plummeting, and the College Football Playoff only has itself to blame

While college football fans outside of Alabama and Clemson spent the last week debating whether or not Part IV is good for the sport, there’s something else about Monday night’s College Football Playoff National Championship that seems conclusive.

Sticking it out in Santa Clara, Calif. was a mistake.

Why would I say that? It actually isn’t even the fact that a couple of teams from the Southeast are playing on the West Coast. It happens. That type of stuff can’t be predicted when these sights are set years in advance.

All you need to look at is the secondary ticket market at realize that having this game in Levi’s Stadium was a bad idea. As of this writing (Friday afternoon), this year’s title game as a get-in price of $126. In other words, $126 will get you the worst available seat in the place. Last year, the get-in price was $1,752.

Now obviously that game was a bit of an outlier because neither Alabama nor Georgia fans had to fly to get to Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.

But already, this year’s title game has the lowest get-in price of the decade (per Ticket IQ):

Title game year

Get-in price

2010

$1,750

2011

$1,125

2012

$849

2013

$251

2014

$317

2015

$202

2016

$1,737

2017

$1,752

2018

$126 (and falling)

And just in case that didn’t drive the perspective point home, check out this stat:

But at the same time, it’s sort of not bonkers when you think about it. The crazy travel costs are the obvious cause of the historic secondary market.

The stadium is an average distance of 2,428 miles from each campus, which is the furthest average distance traveled for each program this decade.

Plane tickets to San Francisco in the neighborhood of $1,000 a pop from major airports in the Southeast (kudos if you found something cheaper than that on such short notice). That’s after both Alabama and Clemson fans had to fly to their respective semifinal games.

That obviously has happened before. But staying a night or two in San Francisco, a place where it’s an average of $199 a night to stay without a national championship going on, is more expensive than any previous Playoff host city.

You want to stay at the Holiday Inn in San Francisco this week? If you got a room, you paid around $700 a night. A Hampton Inn? That’ll be $1,049. Anyone could’ve seen that coming. After all, the two most expensive U.S. cities to live in are San Francisco and San Jose, according to CNBC.

So why in the world did the College Football Playoff decide that this would be a good idea? Well, clearly they thought the market was somewhat inelastic, and that even if the secondary ticket market took a dip, it would still be more than enough to make a pretty penny.

But then again, of course this would be the thought process when it comes to college football. Fox Sports announcer Tim Brando told Sporting News that this kind of greed is par for the course.

“It’s lack of foresight and just grabbing the cash. It’s a money grab. Some thought needs to be given to these locations, instead of just going with the highest bidder.”

Levi’s Stadium, which fittingly opened the first year of the Playoff, is also 46 miles away from where they’re having the halftime show in San Francisco. In fact, nothing is centrally located because they decided to have things like the AT&T Playoff Playlist Live! in San Jose, which is 9 miles from the stadium and 49 miles from San Francisco.

It’s going to be a logistical nightmare, which clearly wasn’t of any concern when the College Football Playoff picked Levi’s Stadium back in 2015.

The likes of Houston, South Florida, Charlotte, Detroit, Minnesota and San Antonio all missed out on getting on of the title games for the 2017-19 seasons. None of those cities will have secondary ticket prices this historically low because all of them will have more affordable flights, more centrally-located festivities and considering Detroit and Minnesota are played in domes, all of them probably would’ve had better playing conditions, too.

Monday’s game is going to played in an outdoor stadium with conditions expected to be cloudy in the 50s. Breaking news: That’s basically how it always is there. That’s why this isn’t just a West Coast issue because at least in Los Angeles or Phoenix, weather isn’t a concern.

Obviously, the in-stadium fan experience was of no concern to the College Football Playoff. Or perhaps, it wasn’t enough of a concern.

It’ll be fascinating to see how low get-in ticket prices drop and if the game even has a full stadium. Even if you were a local who wanted to attend, getting to Santa Clara in California traffic for a 5 p.m. local time kick seems ambitious, to say the least. That again explains why the get-in price is so low.

The good news is that the next 5 sites for the title game are New Orleans, Miami, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Houston, all of whom actually have plenty of experience hosting championship events (unlike Santa Clara).

The other good news for the College Football Playoff and ESPN will be that ratings won’t suffer, despite what the naysayers will claim about being sick of this matchup. But in the end, the rare combination of low ticket prices and unhappy fans will prove to be an embarrassing look for the College Football Playoff.

Brando was right. Santa Clara will prove to be a mistake, and it’ll be up to the College Football Playoff not to make it again.

Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.

Then why do you take the time to read them? What else is there to write about at the moment in the realm of college football besides the latest underclassman to declare for the draft or the umpteenth post-mortem on the season? Frankly, I thought it was a good and interesting article that adds more to the conversation over how this was a hot mess of a decision on awarding the game to Santa Clara.

There are several issues in the story that don’t make perfect sense. If it was not Alabama and Clemson there would be no dip in ticket prices. It was crazy expensive for Clemson and Alabama fans to go to Phoenix in 2015 and that didn’t hurt ticket sales. ND to Miami, Auburn to Pasadena. Hungry fans bases would pay to go. I realize the ND and Auburn scenarios included a BCS invite in early December so the flights were a little bit more reasonable with a month’s notice instead of 9 days. Most Clemson fans and Bama fans had a pretty good idea that their teams were going for a few months. Airline tickets can be cancelled with a change fee. Hotel reservations can be cancelled with no fee within 24 hours. I already have my reservations for New Orleans for January 12th and 13th 2020. The weather aspect is a complete joke. Atlanta was freaking miserable last year. The tailgate sucked because of freezing cold rain and the lines to get in where long, freezing, and wet. They delayed all entrances for hours because of the Presidential visit. The writer mentions the weather with no recollection of what the pregame was like last year. I’ll admit all other venues where Bama played where great, the Rose Bowl tailgate being my favorite so far. 50 degrees and cloudy in Santa Clara in January does not make for an unpleasant time. A light wind breaker is all that will be needed for the tailgate and perhaps a mid size jacket for the game. You won’t need gloves or anything else heavy. Yes, there are no casual college football fans in the Bay Area, but at any of the other Bama championships there were no casual fans either. Come to think of it, in my opinion this was a fairly poorly written article that lacked much insight or research.

So, 2015 was the second lowest price on tickets. Also your complaints about last year’s venue are certainly valid, but I didn’t hear anything about the halftime show being 46 miles out last year. Was it?

LSUSMC – “If it was not Alabama and Clemson there would be no dip in ticket prices.” If it was Oklahoma vs ND they might not be the highest ever but I would not be sitting where I will be for as cheap as I am.
Bcreek – No one gave me anything in life. I worked for everything I have.

Agree, believe it or not. This article was right on target, putting the game in the Bay Area is a disaster for one more reason, there is virtually no fan base for college football in that area and certainly not for southeastern championship teams. People will not be forced to spend their bank accounts to go when they can have a 50 yard line seat at home or in their local sports bar. Idiots made this decision with no thought given to the game or the fans.

You’re (note the spelling) correct, CFB Fan! They should write about exciting sports happening this week, such as USA Hockey or perhaps NCAA Lacrosse. Look around, there isn’t much that’s newsworthy happening in college sports this week. I think a better solution would be you driving I65 south into Mobile Bay?

Plus, people in California are not very interested in football, especially a game between Alabama and Clemson. The CFP probably should strike all California venues off the list. What are the chances of a California team making it to the final anyway?

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal last Saturday about hotel rates and meals in San Francisco being high next week because of a Biotech Companies and Investors Conference being held there starting tomorrow.

This article is full of good information. The site of the game sounds like a real nightmare. I would want no part of that period. Being an Alabama fan up North I was excited to see how low ticket prices were until I checked into it and found out where the game was played…

You sort of dance around the real issue without actually hitting it. Sports broadcasting is just an arm of international media corporations, the giant industry that pumps garbage news 24×7 and eats it’s own crap. None of them want to admit what any of us who have been to the left coast in the past 2 decades knows. It’s not a golden arches and sunshine, it’s an infested cesspool of stinking hemp head vegan progleft America hating yippies and dippies that sling feces and drink yard grass.

These ingrates despise American heritage including the venerable traditions like college football, yet their idiot politics drive up the price of breathing to the moon and make any sane normal person feel like they’re in an alien petting zoo. Why on earth would any normal person who is an SEC/ACC fan want to go to that helehole?

I lived out there many years. I watched several sporting events. NCAA basketball regionals, World Cup soccer, football, basketball, etc. Santa Clara University was one of my clients and was on a nice campus. Most of them, I could get excellent seats and weren’t very crowded. Seemed more like wine-and-cheese affairs anyplace I went rather than tailgate atmosphere, but Santa Clara crowd was more down-to-earth.

I went to see Auburn in Pasadena, but that was only because at the time I was stationed at Camp Pendleton a few hours away. No way I would pay all that money to travel to San Francisco now assuming Auburn had made it.

We went to the Rose Bowl last year while using Las Vegas as our base. The only reason we went was the game was on my bucket list if UGA ever got there. It was a great experience and we found a cheap $100 RT air fare from Vegas to Burbank the morning of the game so we made out well. But now I have done it and would not likely do it again.

Sporting events are now for rich people exclusively anyways. I LOVE CFB and have since I was a kid, but the average guy like me can’t even afford to go to a home game anymore, much less travel across the country and pay 1/3 of my monthly wages to watch 22 kids chase an inflated leather bag around a cow pasture for 3 hours. I can’t even afford the $126 get in on this down year. I stopped going to Hogs games when the ticket price hit $50 a pop. $1000 a head is ridiculous. I wouldn’the pay that if the Pope was there to say the openingame prayer and Elvis was fronting the Beatles at halftime.